Virtual Eternity (the Serialized Novel) Episode 19 - The Barhopping: Finding more perfects at Miami Beach

This is Episode 19 of the serialized version of the novel, Virtual Eternity: An Epic 90s Retro Florida Techo-Pro-Life Love Story and Conversion Journey. These 52 episodes are presented here free for you every Friday. You can buy the paperback version from Mike Church’s Crusade Channel Store (at a lower price than Amazon!). Or you can start reading at the Table of Contents: here

The Barhopping: Finding more perfects at Miami Beach

But the restaurant/tavern pulled me back in with its leisurely flurry, its bottles lining the mirrors in the darkness, and its agile, friendly barmaid. My thoughts about Meredith were too grave. The alcohol would muddle my reflections and evaporate them by tomorrow. Drink the spirits, and one’s mind will turn to humor. How do people brood when they’re drunk? Drinking had always worked for me when my concerns were merely the approval of my mates.

The bartender must serve me soon. There. The warmth of vodka covered me like a steaming bath. I poured the vodka and tonic water through me for over an hour. I searched for silliness and listened to the jibes of the three sports fans next to me. My hazing eyes often drifted across to the dark corner where Meredith had sat. I remembered how I had bled the youth from her.

After two hours, the bartender refused to pour for me, since my driving was her responsibility in this society. With a final glance to where Meredith had been, I left.

As I drove north past Miami toward my suburb, the energy attracted me. The city and its lights ablaze on the dark earth promised activity to distract my mind from its dismal thoughts. One automatically turns to any light in the pitch black. I veered the car off the highway into the brightness, past office buildings, past parking garages and lots, past condemned neighborhoods, over the bridge to Miami Beach. I stopped in the café and pub district.

Thousands of people crammed inside the short Art Deco buildings lining the street off the beach. I hobbled down the sandy sidewalks. Youth lingered outside the storefronts, away from the crowds they sought. The exuberance, the music, the laughter, and the alcohol were inside. That will wrestle my thoughts from Meredith and my child. I hurried into the first bar.

Why had Meredith snuffed the life from the baby? She had more learning and exploring to do in this life. She was too young. Would I have been faithful to her? How could she have trusted me? I was a sinner, a scoundrel, after all.

The bartender avoided me. I was lost in the bustle of the others. I trudged out and into the next bar, which served a more elite group dressed only in black and white. They cast glances at me in my khakis and collared, dark blue long-sleeved shirt as if I were a leisurely restaurant waiter.

My cells had continued in another life form. Was it a human? Did it think? Did it smile? Did it enjoy Beauty? It would be alive now, if Meredith had faith in me. If only I had been more compassionate, Meredith would have noticed. I had forgotten to consider that my lovers were also people, all with the eternal I had been seeking in Lana, above owned things to brag about.

I left the monochromatic bar without a drop to appease me. I would walk. Maybe the street and the cooler sea air would jar the abysmal thoughts from me.

That baby might have been my direction. It would have overseen my confused life, informed all my choices, selected my wife for me, and forced me to make my career thrive. It would have kept me from enjoying the computer games. It would have kept me from discovering the beauty of Lana, and her judgments. She would have ignored me.

I continued. I looked up and noticed I had left the district of bars. Somewhere I had crossed into a barren office and residential district.

If only I had more care and Meredith had more courage, what passions might the infant have known? What achievements might she have made? How many other lives might she have created? Were there more lives lost than one? Into the third millennium, there might have been tens of thousands of lives resulting from this one baby.

Had my relations with other women also created life? Sometimes they had hindered their eggs, or I had stopped my seed from reaching them. Those acts also had the potential for thousands of lives.

Life was too delicate. My mother could have lost me from her body, like my aborted sister before me. I would not exist. I would not have passed on my life to create any other. My characteristics, my self, would never live beyond me.

Like my sister, 24 years and at least 9 months ago, I could have been removed from my mother’s womb, accidentally or intentionally, with parts of me preserved for some reason. Or what if my mother had become distressed or if she had lurched too quickly to pick up something? I could have been unlatched from her and flushed out. My cells could have been dispersed in the earth, or saved in some test tube. What if my sister had not been washed out? I never would have been granted life.

Life was too delicate. I should take more care with mine. I should give more care. To be dispersed might happen at any time. I could soon be sprinkled into the dirt as my sister, Olson, Kevin, and my offspring were.

I wandered for almost an hour.

I passed more stores and a few offices, now empty. They were still lit, in monument to their power.

A cluster of teens brushed by me.

“I’ll slice you up, what do I care?” one shouted after he passed.

The others laughed. “Do it, man! You wuss.”

“Slash him, so what?”

I walked on. The night shielded the delinquents. When they turned the corner behind me, my survival was ensured. But in an instant, they could have dispersed me. My eyes would shut. My mind, that which gave many confusing meanings to life, that which cleared away the uncertain haze of mere material movements to form the beauty of the earth and faces, would cease, or continue.

My body would die one day. I was sure of this, because I was made. The precise cell of my father, one of billions, met the precise cell of my mother, one of thousands, to produce me. A different patriarchal or matriarchal cell would have started someone else. I was fortunate to have been created through them. But I faced this liability: my body must expire.

We ignore death. Dispersal is many years away, we say. Also, one’s behavior causes it, so one can avoid it. The games might have enticed Kevin to suicide, but he played Phase 3 for almost four weeks, only a week more than me. Olson might have been saturated with stress or cursed with the heart conditions that his race tended to have more than others, but I faced the same career, and ending.

So, these explanations failed to soothe me. I must not disregard the debt I owed for the fortune of existing. What should I care for? My career? I should leave my career. No, I was now forced to stay and to engage the games. If not, I could be fined or could go to prison for violating the secrecy law. But I realized the real reason I must remain: I was now the only one who believed Magic Theater should stop. The one solution was to stay in Peyton Beach. The one solution was to play, to dig deeply into the games, and, possibly, to die. Why had I enjoyed the depravity the games rendered? Had they killed Kevin? Why didn’t the company report anything? Had they found my Phase 3 smart card, which Kevin used? I should go, now, and find my card in Kevin’s apartment. Then I could play my own games and unlock the latest secrets of Magic Theater, the solutions of how to destroy it, and the reasons for the excesses I discovered in it.

My walking circle complete, my thoughts heavier, I returned to the street of bars lining the beach. I was surprised at the strengthened bustle as the night passed its midpoint. My curiosity and my need for alcohol to dampen my seriousness pushed me into the next bar, a teal and orange pub considered Irish. Loud screeches emanated from the little rounded building. It overflowed with people. The music pounded with its rhythm of intercourse. By a stroke of luck, the bartender looked at me. He soon slid two vodka and tonics to me. Now forget gravity. Remember mirth.

This proved difficult. I sat in a corner at the bar for a long time, far from the Irish band. After the barman slid five or six more glasses to me, my thoughts blurred.

The crowd celebrated. The band urged them on.

I gulped down the vodka and watched the other creatures who were fortunate to live. My eyesight hazed. Were this weekend pleasure and weekday labors our only dividends from persisting through gestation and life? This question caused a grin. By chance, a girl smiled back. Her companions talked with men she seemed indifferent to.

The girl moved nearer. Now and again, she turned to me. As usual, my motivations came back to women. This girl, sheepishly stealing glances at me, turned my thoughts from the solemn. Why? Lana had done this. My passion for Lana kept me from chasing my friends’ respect. It also kept me from the games, that hallucinatory realm of genocide and just-legal sex. That passion sent me to an authentic realm of Beauty, female forms, and poetry.

In this moment, I grasped that what distinguished living things from dead ones is not knowing bodies and joys, but the potential to know, and to choose to know, the perfect eternal on this earth.

Eventually, using the correct balance of glances and gestures I had mastered, I persuaded the girl to break from her circle. She stood next to me, smiling.

“Weren’t you in my Sociology class last semester?” she asked.

“No, I’m not a student. I moved on to the real world. You’re going to college here?”

“Yeah, I’m a senior. I’m Celia.” She held out her hand, which I kissed as she laughed.

“Hi, Celia. I’m Jonathan. Shouldn’t you be up at the big football game in Gainesville? It’s tomorrow night, right?”

“Yeah! We’re going up in the morning.” She tossed her black hair.

I spun the discussion as I was trained. Celia had a long, tanned Mediterranean face. Her eyes were almond shaped, like Paula’s, but brown.

We chattered for over an hour. Despite this preoccupation and the alcoholic cloud in which I moved, I often remembered Meredith, the pain I caused her, and my delicate existence. These thoughts impelled me to learn Celia, her choices, her fears and sufferings and how to appease them, learn her beauty, and sorrows, and to express my knowledge of all these to her.

What about Lana? She was more beautiful and more compelling. But she held within her only the beauty of Lana. I had Beauty to create and see and touch in Celia, and in others.

***

The next day I found Kevin’s apartment empty. I spoke to the apartment manager, who said that the family had collected his things three days before. All I needed was the tiny card, my key to Phase 3. My card. The manager shrugged when I asked about the computer system.

“Some guy from Vincula picked it up. He said it was their property.”

“Did he show you identification?”

“Did he need to? It was just a computer. The family didn’t want it.”

I asked someone in the Systems Administration department about the computer. He said he’d ask around, but never called back.

So no one at Vincula seemed to know where the computer or the card was. For the rest of the week, I waited for the phone call announcing that they found my card in Kevin’s possession.

Meanwhile, on three of the weeknights, Celia and I learned to laugh with one another, to hold one another’s hand, to kiss, and more.

On the following Saturday, the last day of September, I rose from Celia’s dormitory bed, which was designed so precisely one person could comfortably occupy it, although we both managed to fit.

The peace of a new Saturday and a tinge of coffee in a breeze jolted my thoughts back to the Motley Cow. Then I gasped. Mike. Mike must have the card. He had even been out sick all week. I must find him.

“What’s today? Saturday? The 30th?”

“Yeah,” Celia said. Today was the Xtreme MusicFest. I kissed her goodbye. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Please do.” She frowned and looked down at herself, at the undressed body I had taken from her.

The event that crowned that summer occurred in an inland landfill field. Sponsors had touted the event as the defining event of a generation. I was schooled in this seductive marketing device, but I still wondered what we would do with such a grand promise. How would the popular historians, the journalists, record these events? Moreover, of course, would I find Mike?

***

On the last morning of September, the sun peered from the east, through sea oats into Dr. Wilson’s bedrooms. Maureen and Winnie had arrived the previous night. Winnie had been offered to house-sit at a vacation home of her boss and doctor, for the week.

Maureen rolled free of the satiny bed sheets then readied herself for the day with care. She anticipated a stunning assembly of men and women for today’s party on the beach. Maybe the jumble of young friends could flesh out the depth of Winnie’s friendship for her, of her friendship for Winnie, and new love for either of them.

Next week: Episode 20 - The Music Festival Part One: Searching for Mike

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